Though strange fads like the blood type diet, going gluten-free or going vegetarian are clearly gimmicks, when your body is in a rut, it helps to change it up a little.

Just like exercise, if you do the same workout every day, its effectiveness will drop - and eating pasta and vegetables all of the time will make it hard to lose weight. But if that is your diet, forget counting calories and just eat meat. Your body will take care of the rest. Don't live the rest of your life that way, that is as crazy as being vegetarian, but for weight loss, it's better to count macronutrients than calories.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was a NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder Project (ESSP) mission designed to make precise, time-dependent global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from an Earth orbiting satellite.

But on February 24, 2009 and it failed to reach orbit.

5 years later, it was time to try again. In 2012, NASA awarded launch services contracts for three United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rockets. And OCO-2 flew on a Boeing Delta II 7320-10C, one of the most successful launch vehicles ever flown with well over 100 successful launches, rather than  on a Taurus XL.

A new study has found that kangaroos, commonly viewed as two-legged hoppers, move with a “pentapedal” gait, planting their tails on the ground in combination with their front and hind legs. 

What’s remarkable is that the tail is anatomically quite different, being made up of more than 20 vertebrae taking on the roles of our feet, calves and thigh bones. “Animals have discovered many uses for their tails,” says professor Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University’s Locomotion Laboratory, “but as far as we know, this is the first use of one as a leg.

Motörhead concert goers may have to sign a waiver before they buy tickets. If that band were in California, they would have to wear a Proposition 65 warning on their shirts.

Why? Because they can give you brain damage, according to a Case Report published in The Lancet. Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian and colleagues from the Hannover Medical School, detail the case of a man who developed a chronic subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain) after headbanging at a Motörhead concert.

In Switzerland, 7,000 to 8,000 persons each year fall ill with a campylobacter infection, making it the most frequent bacterial disease transmitted through food.

Many traits unique to humans are thought to have originated in the genus Homo between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago in Africa.

What are the evolutionary factors that drove them?

A large brain, long legs, the ability to craft tools and prolonged maturation periods were all thought to have evolved together at the start of the Homo lineage as African grasslands expanded and Earth's climate became cooler and drier. However, new climate and fossil evidence analyzed by a team of researchers suggests that these traits did not arise as a single package. Rather, several key ingredients once thought to define Homo evolved in earlier Australopithecus ancestors between 3 and 4 million years ago, while others emerged significantly later.

Researchers have announced the discovery of a gene, zic-1, that enables stem cells to regrow a head after decapitation in flatworm planarians.

The earthquakes in central Oklahoma since 2009 are likely attributable to subsurface wastewater injection at a handful of disposal wells -
Oklahoma earthquakes constitute nearly half of all central and eastern U.S. seismicity from 2008 to 2013, many occurring in areas of high-rate water disposal.

These are legacy drilling operations, not modern natural gas fracking.

The reduction of soil carbon stock caused by the conversion of pasture areas into sugarcane plantations is very common change in Brazil in recent years but those worried about the impact on CO2 can rest easy. It can  be offset within two or three years of cultivation.

The calculation by researchers at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (CENA) of the University of São Paulo (USP) in collaboration with colleagues from the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (Esalq), also at USP, concluded, "Soil carbon stocks on land-use change process to sugarcane production in South-Central Brazil."

Acoustic vibrations – sound waves – are produced by radiation pressure inside stars. While physicists have long posited that young stars vibrate differently than older stars, a new study says it is the first to confirm these predications using concrete data from outer space. 

First author Konstanze Zwintz, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven's Institute for Astronomy, and her colleagues studied the vibrations of 34 stars aged under 10 million years and sized between one and four times the mass of our sun.